


Plans With Claws and Teeth

by Tallulah



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, Plans, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 19:51:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17209847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tallulah/pseuds/Tallulah
Summary: In Los Angeles, Mello considers his next move.





	Plans With Claws and Teeth

In Mello’s memories, Los Angeles is him lying on a beaten-up bed in a shitty motel, watching cockroaches and plans chase each other across the ceiling.

Really, it’s been a lot of other things – a lot of washing dishes and delivering pizza, a decent amount of passing on packages from one suspicious individual to another in dark, hot alleyways, the odd offering of sexual favours to grease the wheels of commerce, and the epic failure of American chocolate not to be disappointing and awful – but it always comes back to lying still, staring at the ceiling, watching, thinking, listening to broken down air-con fail to condition the air, sweat on his upper lip.

He’s getting there. He’s not a _big player_ , but he’s not a… well, he’s not just a bottle-washer, not just a runner. Nor is he a moron waiting tables and dreaming big. Probably… probably a small-time crook. Yeah. Being a small-time anything is bullshit, but so is being an idiot who thinks they can leapfrog from zero to everything as soon as they arrive. He never thought that. (Being a homeless teenager who knew a lot but whose knowledge was more theoretical than he’d have liked, being someone on a steep learning curve despite having spent most of his life in an actual school for geniuses, that was bad enough. He made up his mind early on he wasn’t going to be caught doing another massive leap and falling short. He was going to be ready.)

He’s a small-time crook, and he wants to be a big player, and there are recognised routes to achieving this. Honestly? The thinking sticks in his memories because that’s the important part. Everything else was set-up or survival. The thinking, when he wasn’t too tired to keep his eyes open, the thinking was when he became him again. Roger and Near and everyone, they thought he _didn’t_ think, just acted. If they’d been at all observant they’d have spotted there was always intent behind the action. (Well, okay, almost always. Whenever anything that mattered was at stake.) 

Tonight he’s not too tired to keep his eyes open and the heat’s not slowing him down. He’s got used to it. Maybe it even incubates thoughts, you know? He can feel a plan growing, a plan with claws and teeth and he thinks now it might be past time to let it hatch. Thing is that small-time crooks who actually have a modicum of intelligence, they know things, they remember things, and they can spot patterns and piece together clues and have a pretty good idea of where the big players that Kira hasn’t got to yet are hiding out. They also have a pretty good idea of the big players’ weak points; of everyone’s weak points, if they want to stay alive. He’ll need to do a little more research, but he’s got most of the pieces already. (He’s thinking severed head. People tend to take notice of severed heads.) Los Angeles never gets cold. Heat makes things hatch out fast. Near’ll never see it coming.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 12daysChristmas on Livejournal, prompt "Four unusual hatchings".


End file.
